Microsoft blocks even more customization apps in Windows 11 version 24H2
neowin.net
neowin.net
What really made me worry about the future of the Windows ecosystem is the increasing amount of telemetry and Microsoft's endless attempts at trying to monetise every part of the system at the expense of my user experience, even if I paid for a license.
Making the base OS usable by disabling telemetry (and Cortana) hidden away in the settings has become a hassle. The UX dark patterns trying to make me switch from Firefox to Edge has become tiring for me. Them experimenting with ads in the file system, even if it was an experimental feature that was "never meant" for public release, made me wonder how far they were willing to push it in future Windows iterations, so I made the switch.
Edit: Worth mentioning that I switched to Fedora XFCE and I stuck with it because it doesn't get in the way of my workflow. I also noticed that it doesn't use as much background resources as W10 which is great.
2 weeks ago I installed Kubuntu on a second nvme SSD in my gaming desktop and I discovered that: working on a desktop is so much more pleasant and working on Kubuntu satisfies all my needs except gaming.
BUT since I got a steam deck, I have been playing mostly there anyway. And yes steam deck is linux too.
I tried and fought enough with macOS, Windows is betraying their own users and not having bash is frustrating. so here we go, full linux.
My children first OS is going to be Kubuntu, let's see how it goes
Third-party tools that restored the W10 taskbar in W11 allowed users to continue having a taskbar that's usable for them yet the latest W11 betas show they're removing that legacy code. It'd be fine if they were replacing it with an equivalent but they're not.
[1] https://www.neowin.net/news/ability-to-move-the-windows-11-t...
Yes, Microsoft hires employees with zero Windows experience to design their operating system.
That's why the Windows 11 taskbar has the icons centred -- because Apple OSX does too.
That's why there's no way to drag the taskbar around -- because Apple OSX doesn't allow this either.
Etc...
It does though.
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mac-help/mchlp1119/mac
I've said things that are totally wrong and been voted up, and said things that are essentially correct except for some tiny detail and been voted down into oblivion.
What especially gets people riled up is if there's an element of tribalism involved. Can be anything: text editors, political party, operating system, programming language, or whatever. You don't even have to be pro/anti any specific tribe. Just mentioning anything to do with such a topic gets people worked up and angry even if your point is strictly neutral or objective.
It's always fun to watch this play out in the microcosm of some obscure topic...
Once there's Linux support for M3 I'll probably switch (have an M1 macbook air with Linux which is doing well) - until then I got things close enough to my Linux Hyprland setup with yabai that it is relatively painfree to use.
They do research, evaluate multiple variations, get buy in from stakeholders and then AB test the final result.
It’s definitely not as simple as let’s do this because I saw it somewhere before.
With the standard Windows layout users can develop “muscle memory”, especially for the bottom left corner of the screen — which is very easy to hit with a mouse because the edges of the screen “trap” the cursor.
With middle aligned icons, every new app shifts the existing icons.
Also there is no icon in an easy to hit location.
Windows 11 has some other design elements that broke Microsoft’s own integrations. As a random example: “Open with VS Code” and “Terminal here” are hidden submenus now.
I think support shouldn't be such an issue, if things are well done. And of course you can always have less-power users, who will have some issue. But they will have issues anyway, if not with a deskbar kind of thing, then with some other thing. Should MS therefore strip their OS of all features? It seems ridiculous. Why not release a "Windows for computer illiterate" version then and keep a capable version?
I realized this in the 90s. Windows 9x, theoretically, should never have existed. I knew this because a DOS subsystem with great speed and compatibility, DOSEMU, existed for Linux. You could play Doom with sound at full speed in DOSEMU on contemporary Pentium hardware. If the open source community could do that, Microsoft, the developers of DOS, could develop a DOS layer for Windows NT that was much better than the sluggish, feature-incomplete layer they did ship. But they didn't prioritize the effort it would take to do so, especially since dividing the Win32 ecosystem into 9x, NT workstation and NT server allowed binning of different Windows versions at different price points.
It is such a neccessary multitasking functionality on work environments that I'm quite lost when Win 10 support ends and the alternative taskbar tools do not work reliably then. Small hope that Windows 12 or whatever comes next would be the better one.
Clearly Microsoft has given up on powerusers, the people who notice and sometimes fix flaws in their monolith. Seems shortsighted.
I first tried Linux sometime in the late 90s, and this might finally be the year I switch over. I do everything else in a Linux VM now, may as well run Linux as host and Windows as a VM.
Anyways, I'm on jetbrains these days and never looked back.
I tried JetBrains Rider and stopped using it after the console window didn't auto scroll as I logged stuff into it - I don't know how something so basic doesn't work properly.
I should probably try again, as so many people recommend it that I can only assume I did something wrong to mess up the console.
(Edited, I originally misunderstood your comment)
I use JetBrains IDEs as my daily drivers, nowadays they're pretty good and feel more responsive than the previous versions (you can even choose between the older type of UI and something more minimalist).
As for the console, is it possible that you weren't scrolled all the way to the bottom? For example, if you scoll up a bit and want to look at specific lines, the console will append the text to the bottom but won't move your viewport, whereas if you scroll back down to the bottom (or use the button for that), it'll start scrolling automatically again.
also my initial choice for a Linux os that I daily drove back in uni, became infested with snap packages which I've had numerous issues with.
(This is not an invite for anyone to tell me about Arch or "$x distro is clearly best", I've settled with pop_os for trials)
Recently I got a steam deck and I'm surprised how good it is in desktop mode, and also at running windows games in proton. I'm actually considering getting a dock and ditching my desktop atx tower. The tracking and telemetry in windows has really put me off it.
I've cobbled together a random ryzen system with an A380 half a year ago and didn't even check for Linux compat before buying, and steam with proton works pretty well on debian 13.
Deal breakers are usually those games that bundle the EA or Epic launcher, those two are fucking dumpster fires when it comes to proton. Like, you fiddle for an hour to get a stupid fucking launcher going that wants an additional account signup and then the whole AAA Windows game runs perfectly fine.
Makes you appreciate Steam/Proton/Valve even more every time.
I have a linux running as my home server, so I have tried out various distros, currently using Mint Xfce.
Besides other reasons here, when you have decades of experience on how things work, hundreds of little utils and tools... and you want to finally concentrate more on productive work in your life and not start the whole hurdle anew.
Maybe if a perfect, seamless VM environment would exist, but that still leaves the HW problems.
I've been using Capture One (lightroom alternative) and Affinity Photo 2 inside the VM and it's been great.
Haven't really tried video editing, but it might not be as great.
Edit: to contribute a little to the grandparent question - I have Windows on QEMU for the Office suite and it works pretty smoothly. I had to make some config changes, most of them outlined in these reddit threads:
https://www.reddit.com/r/qemu_kvm/comments/18z8609/qemu_wind...
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChromeOSFlex/comments/ucno4b/qemukv...
I also disabled animations in Windows settings because everything felt clunky.
No crashes, clipboard and shared folders work fine after installing guest tools.
Running genuine MS Windows® in a VM is very possible but much less necessary than, say, 10 years ago, if you want to run some non-esoteric Windows software. It also technically requires a license.
Using a Windows VM is a pretty good solution. Though last time I tried only commercial solutions like VMWare work very well, because KVM-based solutions didn’t have great graphics support. Maybe VirtualBox is better, but Oracle.
I've used both QEMU and Virtualbox to run them, mostly Virtuabox (yes, oracle sucks, it was still sun when I started), and probably the most demanding things I do on it is Visio, which I use for some very complex design docs in windows it general struggles with already. I used windoze xp in vm for ages even past its date of expiration, basically until newer Visio's no longer supported it, and all windows versions tried (7 and 10) have worked fine outside their own UI quirks.
I don't even enable 3d drivers, or try to make it do graphics-heavy things. Everything else I can do fully in Linux (including gaming), and this has been in supporting most any and every sort of enterprise across those years in technology.
Anyone that tells you Linux can't/doesn't work is being obstinate, ignorant, or lazy.
The Steam Deck is actually what's pushed me closer to adopting Linux on my desktop. I usually run Windows just because it's the easiest OS to run games on, but the Steam Deck has really shown that with Proton you can run... basically anything!
Every tool that I use is cross-platform these days, anyway. VS Code, Blender, Inkscape, Godot, etc.
EA just simply will not allow it
The biggest one was the option to not merge apps in the taskbar down to one icon, and the option to show titles. They finally brought that feature to 11, but apparently the smaller taskbar is gone too? The only option was a larger one that always takes up much more space. I like it to show all the time, so I’d prefer a thinner taskbar.
Sure there are these hacky third party apps, but it’s not native. I don’t understand why they took all these power-user features away. As far as I know you can’t put the taskbar on the side or top edges of the screen either.
I think microsoft is playing a dangerous game with messing around with windows like this, it could lead to a domino effect causing a mass exodus of users.
Google is going through the same thing now, it was the king of search but now search sucks and I and my friends are using other search engines more and moving away from google tools. I don’t even remember the last time I used gmail.
And then MS seems to think they are doing any better with their online office suite. Well no, there are many people, who even want to quit their jobs, because of having to use that shit and how dystopian bad it is. MS losing more reputation there as well.
I feel there is a notion now, that MS is simply no longer able to make any quality software product. They got VSCode, but that will be enshittified before long as well.
Even VSCode is starting to turn to shit. They are adding all this voice bloat to VSCode, at no time ever while programming have I ever wanted to leave a voice comment, it's inefficient and stupid. I could understand if it was a plugin or extension but to add it to the core? Plus all the other garbage they are shoveling in it which could have just been extensions. They have lost the plot. Also I feel it getting a little sluggish to the point where I am planning on finding a good enough past version and locking on it and rejecting all future updates.
With the March update the only thing that seemed it could be useful was the "locked scrolling" feature.
Were it not for sizeable investments in Windows-specific apps, I would have moved away.
I am currently using:
* ExplorerPatcher (replace taskbar)
* OpenShell (replace start menu)
* ProcessExplorer (replace task manager)
* XYPlorer (replace file manager)
* Utilities like Notepad++, Paint.net
* Winsplit Revolution (Window management)
* BatteryCare (Power management)
* USBSafelyRemove (USB device management)
* Etc.
And hopefully though updates to the tools with regards to the security issues by itself keeps it all good.
The very reason why those tools exist though is because there's a sizeable enough demand. What's under question is that 'unintention', all the more so when features are being removed, without leaving some settings in for power users. Some user experience changes seem backward steps.
If doing that little is now considered "modding" a desktop OS, we've fucked up somewhere. Even phone OSes like Android let you download replacements of built-ins (such as another launcher, file manager, photo app) right from their app store.
ExplorerPatcher /is/ modding. It's not killing explorer.exe and launching another UI that is independent from the os like, say, what blackbox for windows or litestep did. It's patching running executables in memory in a way that could break whenever any data structure gets changed in a Windows update, which is a big deal because Windows is a rolling release OS that constantly adds and remove features. Users of explorer patcher found themselves having to boot in windows safe mode to disable it in the past after windows update ran. It's literally breaking your machine in a way that computer users that aren't very savvy might not understand how to fix. It's very bad publicity for MS who might get blamed by some: "my computer isn't starting anymore after a windows update, I hate MS" so it makes perfect sense to prevent this program from launching in a new major update.
And it's relying on the assumption that the old code paths it depends on won't disappear in the future. EP doesn't have a replica of the old windows taskbar: it's merely disabling Windows 11's new one and forcing the old one to appear, and it can do that because the code for the Windows 10 task bar is still there. You surely don't expect this to survive all future refactorings and cleanups?
ExplorerPatcher is the kind of software that would have been neat in the old world of Windows where a release of Windows gets frozen and sees no major changes past security updates except for the release of a Service Pack which you have to manually install yourself. It is a terrible idea in the current world of a rolling release state OS.
The Win10 bar code has been there, since October 2021, though? I don't know how frequent refactorings are (at M$FT) but given it's been there for nigh three years, I don't see how that's a relevant factor.
Even _if_ it were refactored (and/or cleaned-up), it wouldn't be omitted from the release notes, right?
Unless it's on the roadmap _for_ cleanup, this change to try to "disallow" the program, purely based on the program name and no other identifiers, doesn't give me (don't know about anyone else) much faith that removal would either be executed or executed well (e.g.: legacy Win code spaghetti'd to other code that they haven't changed/fixed, yet).
If I were a betting person, new feature 'x' for cloud or advertising purposes would take priority over any modification[s] or clean-up/removal.
In other words, there's no ROI (read: profit) in fixing their technical debt, currently, and there hasn't been for almost three years (if we go with the lifetime of the Win10 bar code existing still in the Win code-base).
Why would that suddenly change?
And it could be removed tomorrow. That's the point.
Historical patterns (thus far) have leaned more towards "could not" (three years is not a modicum of time measured in the software lifecycle).
They deserve to be blamed but for something else: 1) create a problem, 2) refuse to solve it, 3) prevent third-party solutions. People used to ungroup tasks and have the taskbar to the side etc. for two decades. At least the ungrouping thing is coming back but Microsoft stubbornness about blocking the remaining features makes me thing something else might be at play other than someone's hurt ego or some designers aesthetic vision.
I wonder how long it'll be before someone comes out with a "distro" that combines the Windows 11 kernel with the Windows 2000/XP userland. WinPE 11 exists, and it actually has some bits of UI that still look like Win7.
Microsoft isn't blocking all customization apps here, of course. They're blocking known [1][2] unreliable, poorly written, high crash rate software that is extremely sensitive to OS changes, hotfixes, and/or upgrades due to the nature of the software (e.g. hooking functions, patching memory, etc).
The block is geared towards a specific revision of the software. The authors will just need to fix the bugs, rev the executable version, and they're good to go. Again.
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-health/res...
Why can’t I have a vertical taskbar? Is that really beyond the combined technical ability of a three trillion corp? Obviously not so it’s a conscious choice to not give users options and control
That people still somehow prefer over native Windows. Makes you realize how bad Windows actually is.
In a world where decision makers only need to think of the short term (cloud computing as global/general panacea), I absolutely see this strategy mixed with some 'AI' buzz words seeing traction.
For retail customers, turning the Windows 11+ machine into a console-like brings further advantages.
HN readers of a certain age, will for sure remember Windows 8, Windows Vista and Windows Me :-) Windows 11 feels the same for me, and is the reason why it’s not installed in any of my PCs.
Mind you, it’s not that macOS is in a better situation, it’s following the same trajectory for some years now.
This is what happens when a big and established company gets tired and starts loosing its soul (see Boing).
I've tried 11 a few times. I do not like it, I do not like the look of it and most of all I absolutely HATE that I cannot have the taskbar on the left hand side of the screen.
> What happened is that we recently made changes to this internal function, and apparently those changes were enough to cause the patcher to go haywire. This is unfortunately a regular occurrence: Whenever a new build goes out, there’s a spike of Explorer crashes because all of these patchers start patching the wrong code, and Explorer starts crashing across all the systems that have these “shell enhancement” programs installed. If you’re really unlucky, their rogue patch crashes something in the Explorer startup path, and users finds themselves stuck with an unusable machine due to Explorer crash loops.
I'm all for blaming Microsoft for all the world's ills, but I'd be inclined to assume good faith on this one.
> The interesting thing here was how the program decided where to install its patches, and in particular how it managed to patch an function that was never exported or stored in a vtable: It found the function by contacting the Microsoft symbol server to get the names of all the functions in Explorer and their addresses!
I don't think anyone would make a program do hacky binary patching like that just for fun. Presumably, they did it that way because Microsoft doesn't offer any reasonable way to accomplish the same functionality. If enough people used the hacky binary patch that it produced a noticeable spike in crashes, then I do blame Microsoft for making it necessary in the first place.
"A new version might be available"
And some windows machines from the windows 7 era can freeze program by program after some days just being on. On windows 10 you can replicate it by just pulling outages until you see this effect, or someing worse.
The issue is caused by the metadata parser and since it doesn't get prompted if you don't use a detailed column view you don't hit the issue that way. Of course, this represents a loss in functionality since you won't be able to sort things by metadata columns like artists/composer/album title etc.
I moved away from Windows as my desktop in 2002 and opted for Apple, and if MS changed their direction - at least for me as a developer - I would embrace "switching back". I'm completely sick of what Apple is doing, and yet aside from open source - where is the large-scale commercial competition that's screaming "we are the opposite of Apple."? I can only speak for myself, however I would be the hugest fanboy for Microsoft if they showed some leadership and actually gave me what I wanted...
Microsoft built its business on developers - some people want to customise their UI - what is the compelling argument to marginalise this minority?
macOS had been completely uneventful for me the last few years and recovered well from the terrible Mojave/Catalina days with the slow overheating Intel MacBooks.
It's just a trend that makes me unhappy as a developer.
Contrast this with the "old" Apple in 2005/6, I could write a game, put it up for download as a DMG file - and even post it to Apple's website for help with promotion and discovery! There were plenty of 3rd party payment solutions available, Apple didn't take a 30% cut. What they were back in the day is actually helpful.
You still can? The binary has to be notarized, but Apple doesn’t take a cut, you can run your own store and sell a game.
For example, hooking into the kernel is now very difficult - apps like Little Snitch running on Sonoma have a much harder job.
For most people that’s a good thing. I had many family members that had all kinds of crap installed, including dubious kexts. If you are a more knowledgeable user, you can still disable most protections. Also, about little snitch specifically, obdev now sells are more user-friendly version in the App Store that uses the new user space filtering API. Every kext is a possible compromise with access to kernel space. It’s good that they are deprecating them in favor of user space drivers.
Yes, however the binary did not have to be signed back then - and I didn't need to pay apple for the privilege of writing software for their OS.
> Also, about little snitch specifically, obdev now sells are more user-friendly version in the App Store that uses the new user space filtering API.
And again, Apple takes their cut and more or less forced Obdev to go in that direction. I agree with you about dubious kexts - however it's just a trend I note - antivirus / third party software filled that hole in the past.
Properly implemented, everyone could freely and easily notarize every single piece of code they need to run. Total freedom, with notarized code to give the leeway to the OS maker to remove code when it’s malware.
The fact of the matter is that the OS makers are greedy AF, and don’t stop at requiring notarization. Windows could get rid of most of its malware issues if they allowed everyone to freely notarize, yet they try and ram the Windows Store down everyone’s throat with their locked down Windows attempts. Can’t let a feature get in the way of a play at even more rent-seeking, am I right ?
Now that the monopoly is established, users don't need to be kept happy.
So I have all automatic updating blocked, and done in such a way that I can revert back if any important features broke.
In the meantime, is this update that's being named in the article actively going out to people who aren't beta testers? Maybe I'll do my 'final' update for a while soon as long as ExplorerPatcher continues to work.
This is ridiculous.
I assume they just want to prevent average Joanne to use the tool, but she wouldn't do it either way or even get the idea to look for it. I mean...there are still people out there browsing the internet without UBlock.
So what's the point?
Don't have it though too.
The point is if it breaks after an update you have to get into windows safe mode to unbreak your system if ExplorerPatcher causes an explorer crash loop (which it did in the past after windows updates ran). Even not-too-average Joe might get stumped by this and not immediately know what to do. The process of getting into safe mode is very cumbersome in itself if you need to do it from a system that boots into the desktop without any issue (windows doesn't consider the explorer crashing infinitely to be an issue): you need to forcefully shut down your computer three times /during the boot process of windows/ so that windows thinks "there's an issue" and gets you into the Recovery mode.
It's not like during Windows 7 and older releases where you only needed to press the F8 key to get a menu for safe mode boot. Anything that forces you to attempt to get into safe mode to fix is thoroughly undesirable and unfun to experience.
I use Linux for everything desktop for almost 20 years now, but keep a windoze vm for Visio, Project, or random other windoze-only crap, and windows 11 just looks grating to even consider. As most do historically, I skip every other windoze version, it has literally added nothing I need since windows xp, and would continue to use it if I could get OS security patches still as a runtime environment for the few mentioned applications.
For the little I do use it, ie. basic navigation and launching apps in the task bar, Microsoft almost ruins what I do have to habitually since XP. I never wanted or needed anything added in 7, 8, 10, or 11.
Haven't looked at it in a while, but last I did it "worked". Resolution on netflix ends up being fine - 1080p - but I couldn't help shake the feeling that its worse.
...check bitrates and sure enough...less than half. Never worked out why, but that's a bit of a show stopper when combined with no online shooters.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/07/microsofts-xcloud-gam...
Many other utilities are there. Most are normal apps. Some tweak registry. Taskbar replacement uses deeper tweaks, hence the claim that they are creating security issues.
I've always wanted to try that but due to prohibitive costs never did.
But with more and more Windows shenanigans I guess it's time to bite the bullet and make the switch .
what a theater!
I wouldn't take an OS recommendation from a person who happened to forget about that.
Android? That's Linux-based.